


A Question of Time

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood Kink, Blood and Violence, Death Fetish, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Horror, Knifeplay, Religious Icons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 11:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6564781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tai lives and dies to serve her goddess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Question of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jayjaybe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jayjaybe/gifts).



The goddess is a harsh mistress. 

"Don't be afraid," she says, but her voice is like the whetting of knives and Tai has always been afraid of this, deep down inside her, right from the beginning of it. How could she not be? The goddess lives to be feared, they say; those who don't fear her just don't know any better. 

"Tai," she says, her voice close by, but they plucked out Tai's blue eyes long ago so she can't see her there. They plucked out her eyes and they told her not to scream, pressed their bloody hands against her mouth because they said the goddess wouldn't like it. She had to be strong, they said, so she was strong. She's been as strong as she knows how to be, because the priestesses told her the alternative: when their brothers the priests of the sun make their sacrifice, it's with fire. 

"Tai," she says, her voice like blades on stone. It's appropriate, Tai thinks. In the oldest of tongues Tai's name is a blade, the old high priestess told her as she dressed her bleeding eyes; her name is the goddess's blade, it's the ritual dagger, two-pointed and sharp. At the dawn of the world in the time before time, she forged her blade and she killed the sun so night would come. She's a warrior. She's the first of all warriors. She's death. 

When they took Tai away, they said _the goddess of death has called you_ and she was so scared that she thought she might die right then and there. Her parents stood in the door of their home and they watched as she left with the priestesses, proud and scared as was their right. Their daughter had been chosen to serve the warrior, the slaughterer, devourer of souls. But she's not the goddess of death, not really. 

"Mistress," Tai says, and her small voice echoes from the sanctum's cold stone walls. She shivers. The simple tunic in which they've dressed her to die is far too thin to warm her, and her feet are bare against the worn old flagstones. If she could see, she knows she'd see the tunic's black and sheer against her too-pale skin beneath it. They've left her nearly bare for the goddess's many eyes, so she'll see the curve of her breasts and her buttocks, the mound of her sex, and Tai blushes hotly as she thinks of it, hot like the sun she hasn't felt in five long years. There are no windows in the temple except the one that they keep closed. They say the sacrifice must be purged of the sunlight as well as her sight. 

"Call me by my name," says the goddess.

She licks her lips. "Kor," she says. She knows the name. It's been on the tip of her tongue her whole life.

In the oldest of tongues, her name is Night and she's the goddess of it. But she's not the moon in all its phases, not the pale light that shines or the stars up in the sky; Kor is the cold dark that holds the stars and holds the moon. Kor is the passing of time. Kor is the void at the end of life. Kor is oblivion.

The goddess brushes past her and Tai's bare arm stings bright with the contact of it, like the briefest kiss of twenty fine, sharp knives. She feels the blood well up hot against her skin, lets it drip down from her fingertips to the stones there at her feet. She'll die tonight, she thinks. The goddess will finally take her. 

"The altar's behind you," says the goddess. "Lie down on it, Tai."

She turns and she steps and she feels for the altar, finds its smooth edge with her bloodied fingertips. She knows it's black, it's a slab of polished granite carved with sigils on a rough-hewn granite plinth. They took her there by torchlight on the day that she arrived, once they'd cut away her clothes with shears and washed her, shaved her, made her ready. _You should be proud_ , they told her after, those priestesses who dared to speak as they walked her to her room, her cell, but she blushed hot with shame. The high priest had had her flower atop the altar, roughly so he'd make her bleed against the stone and let the goddess know they had her, know that she'd be ready soon. The priestesses watched. 

She hears the tear of the gauzy tunic, feels the whisper of breath against her skin but it's bitter cold, like wind-whipped snow burning in the eyes she lost, like the ice water the priestesses pour into the tub each time she bathes. Heat belongs to the sun. She's been cold for years. 

"Do you want to please me, Tai?" the goddess asks, and cold fingers like ice, like frosted knives, brush down between her breasts. Her nipples are so hard from the cold that they ache and an icy mouth finds one of them, but the teeth and the tongue and even the lips there are sharp. They cut at her, they make her bleed. The potion she drank from the high priestess's steel cup doesn't serve to numb the pain; it makes the pain feel like pleasure and she moans with it, hears that moan echo.

"Yes," she says, as her hands clasp the altar's edges, and her voice trembles, falters on the word though she means it with every last drop of blood in her. The priestesses told her the alternative, though she doesn't think that even one of them truly understands. Theirs is the oldest religion but there are truths that even they can't know, after all.

That knife-sharp mouth travels down, sucks, bites, and so she thinks that perhaps the goddess believes the sincerity of her reply. Blood wells, gathering warm in her navel, running over her sides in hot trickles and down to the altar beneath till the sigils all fill and she's slick with it, faint with it. Sharp hands find her thighs and part them wide. The sharp tongue finds the lips of her sex and it licks them, fingers part them, lips brush the little nub there that the priestesses forbade that she touch and she gasps a breath of chilly air, cries out as the goddess's fingers push inside her, tear her, cut her, make her moan and clench and shiver. The tongue laps at her, the fingers spread her wide and she reaches down to run her fingers through the goddess's long, sharp hair, though it cuts her to the bone. 

"Do you love me, Tai?" the goddess asks, and blood drips from her mouth and rains down upon Tai's skin. The goddess's edged right hand is wrist-deep inside her and she clenches tight around it, brings her own hand down to rub hard at that long-forbidden nub, blood-slick circles that make her tremble right down to her toes. It's never been like this before.

"Yes," she says, and she's terrified by it. 

Little Tai was never like the other girls, they said. She was different. She was odd. The people in her village all kept far away from her and all her little family, so she wandered in the woods alone. She paddled in the stream alone, played alone in meadows after dusk, after dark. Her mother taught her to shoot rabbits with her bow and her father taught her how to cook them after. She'd smear their blood on her breasts and her thighs and her cunt, write all the runes and the sigils that she knew there all over her skin and ask the night to come and take her, please, _please_ , right now. She'd touch herself under her skirts the way she knew she wasn't meant to because Kor's priestesses knew better, pushed her fingers up inside herself till she'd shiver and pant and cry out loud. And then, one night, the night shivered back at her. 

"I bet you're lonely," she said to the dark. "I bet no one understands." The dark shimmered its response like moonlight's glint on glass, like glass in the air, and every night after that she went out in the woods after dark, come rain or come snow or come bitter, howling winds. She'd go down on her knees and she'd open her blouse, she'd pull up her skirts and she'd show herself, part her lips and rub and moan and wait for the glint like glass in the air. In the dark, she felt she knew the goddess like the stars did, the sacrifices that the priestesses had made to their dark goddess for ten thousand years or more, their souls put up high to watch the world. She wanted more than that, more than death and a pinprick of light she can only see when she dreams, because the stars are blind. Now she has it. Her lonely goddess speaks to her.

"I've been waiting for you, Tai," the goddess says. "Don't be afraid." And she puts her freezing, bladed palms against the sockets where Tai's eyes once were, where they put in polished stones instead then sewed them shut. When the goddess scoops them out, in a moment Tai can see again though she has no eyes with which to do so, the altar and the blood and the moonlight through the skylight that the priestesses unseal only once in fifty years, for this. And all she sees of the goddess is a silver glint in the air like a hundred knives turned all on edge. This is the night. _She_ is.

"Kor," she says, and the knives all turn together. 

She's neither young nor old, nor here nor there. She's eight feet tall and thin as a blade but strong as steel. She's a patchwork, a puzzle, broken shards of a metal mirror that shift against each other, scraping darkly as she moves. She's a hundred souls in one with their two hundred staring eyes. She's the swords of all who sought her out to steal or buy another year from her, another ten, another lifetime, but died instead to give her form. 

Tai is meant to be afraid of her. She's meant to cower there before her. She's meant to die to appease the goddess for the coming fifty years, so she'll kill the sun each night to end the day and make time pass. They all know that nothing lives in the absence of time, that there's no life without death to end it. The goddess is both benevolent and cruel; after all, the sun can't be reborn to start another day until it dies. 

The other girls she knew all prayed to Fala, the goddess of beauty, or they prayed to Sura, the goddess of love. They prayed to Amala, the sun, the goddess of life, whose priestesses wear gold bracelets with gold bells around their wrists, around their ankles, and dance outside the sun temple's gates each morning with the dawn. But Tai was raised to worship death; before she was chosen she was meant for a priestess of Kor, to wed a Korran priest and then to raise new Korran children in the faith, new generations to repeat the cycles. The others never understood. The other Korrans don't quite seem to grasp it, either. 

Kor is not the goddess of death: Kor is the goddess of time. Tai smiles. The fear she's always felt is not fear of the goddess, after all. The goddess is everything she wants, everything she's ever wanted. 

When she reaches out her hand, Kor takes it. When she pulls her down onto the altar, Kor goes with her willingly. She kisses Kor's sharp mouth, she slips on top of her sharp body, she presses to her angles and she bleeds on the shards and the knives and the slivers of all that Kor is. She parts Kor's thighs then her lips between them to rub at the nub that she finds there, though it's like icy needles in her fingertips. Kor didn't have to take this form, Tai knows that. She didn't have to manifest at all, could have watched in the dark and waited till Tai took up the two-pointed dagger and slit her own throat as she was meant to, her blood on the altar like so many before. But Kor came to her this way by choice, and her moan is like a sword edge scraping stone as her fingers shred Tai's skin. She clutches at Tai's shoulders in her pleasure then and breaks the bones beneath her hands. It's ecstasy. It's the dark before death.

"You're dying, Tai," the goddess says, when the waves of her climax finally subside, as she lays her down on the stone, and Tai knows it's true. She knows she is. It's the very act for which the priestesses have brought her here. It's what she was prepared for. 

"Dying like the sun," she says, and she's terrified by what it is that she's suggesting. "But I could be reborn tomorrow."

In the silence that follows, she know Kor understands now. When she smiles, her teeth are bloody razors and she understands her perfectly, just as she always has, the glint in the dark that's been with her all these years. Tai could be reborn.

"You were today," the goddess says, and what's left of Tai's blood runs cold in her because in a flash she knows _she's_ the one who didn't understand this. The goddess knows best. The goddess always knew. The sun will rise in the morning after night but it's not rebirth, it's something darker, and she wonders as she fades how many times she's lived and died today. Perhaps Kor will tell her. Perhaps she has already. Perhaps she has a hundred times, a hundred thousand times, or more. Perhaps she never will, but in the end Tai knows she's got her wish because the night has come to take her. 

"Do you love me, Kor?" Tai asks. 

"More than the sun," Kor replies, and she means it. 

The goddess is a harsh mistress, both benevolent and cruel. But Tai will die a thousand times to be with her. 

Tai's goddess is a harsh mistress. But Kor will halt the world for love of her.


End file.
